OK, I have a 'solution' of sorts. It's really bad though.

Basically I'm looping through the records in a cursor, so it starts bad... and gets worse.

I've set the following

SET...

Thanks all for the replies. I know the system performing the locks is bad, why they couldn't have gone for optimistic locking I'll never know. But I cannot control that...

You are correct, there is no deadlocking to worry about.

I just need a way to check for locks BEFORE updating.

It sounds really simple but I'm lost.

My question is how to skip past the locked record. Not how to update it. I know you cannot update it but I don't the whole process stopped because of...